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Last week was on the lighter side due to two very late nights and a violent 24 hours or so of back spasm. I returned to the Rockies on Sunday for another tempo session around Swan Lake. But I was not feeling the love this week. It was windy and I just seemed slow. I was slow. Times were about 15-20 seconds off the last session. It’s fine, though. Sometimes you just have a sub-par run. Afterwards we headed straight to the gym where we had lunch and avoided the blaring NYC Marathon coverage on the café’s television. That would have to wait until later. There were heavy objects to be lifted and boxes to be jumped up and down on and off of first.

The next day my legs were peppy as hell. I zipped along at sub 8:30 with nary a pant. Tuesday evening was the final evening of my storytelling class. That involved a performance. I went for a run early in the day, did a little work and then spent the rest of the day relaxing, meditating and even napping. This is a luxury I rarely allow myself. It was fun to do on a Tuesday.

The performance went well (or, at least, people told me it did), then we had dinner with some friends and then the evening’s second act began, as we discovered that our car had been towed. Everything turns into a pumpkin at 11pm, according to the NYPD. Since I’m rarely out that late (and we arrived at an empty parking space at 11:20), I forgot. So we walked about a mile and a half to the tow pound, calling on the way as they searched for our car. Eventually they found it and, after taking a sum of money from us that I’d rather not disclose, we had our car back. I will read street signs (and my watch) more carefully from now on.

We got to bed at about 2:00am. I was exhausted the next day. So I didn’t run.

Thursday was another speed session. This time around I departed from Jack Daniels’ assigned work(b)out and decided to do what Jonathan called a “classic 5K workout”: 1K repeats at goal 5K pace. Goal for the near future is 6:25. That would get me under 20:00. I went to the track and attempted these but found myself struggling. But I wasn’t struggling with running so much as I was struggling with math. I got home and realized I ran the repeats too fast by about 5 seconds per minute pace. That doesn’t sound like much, but, believe me, you feel it when you’re already pushing the effort. I could only do three of my planned five. I did what I’ve done before, which is to cut down the length of the repeats and up the speed for the last few. It wasn’t a terrible workout or anything.

I miss mile training. 5K training is so much harder.

Friday featured a slow recovery run and legs too tired to do strides. Then a long day in the city, capped off with a midnight showing of a concert film by Sigur Rós called INNI. That ended at 1:30am. And then. We managed to get ourselves caught in a traffic jam at 2:00am. Police had closed off a great swath of the West Side Highway, so traffic got diverted. We got to bed at around 3:00am.

I must have been sitting weird all day because I got out of the car, twisted slightly, and then my back went into a screaming, oh-god-what-the-fuck-is-that back spasm. That lasted through the next day. Moving around a lot helped. Sitting sent it back into spasm. So I’ve been moving around a lot.

Are there any serious athletes built for late nights? Unlucky about the car-towing. Only time that’d happen here would be if the POTUS happened to be visiting and you parked your car on his motorcade route.

I’ll give you a hot math tip: Do 1k intervals with metric pacing. 5 x 1k in 4 minutes each = 20 minute goal .) Anyway, even though shortened you did well. I bailed totally last Sunday as the legs weren’t feeling up to it. Will try again this Sunday.